Jeremy Corbyn’s thuggish close ally John McDonnell is in danger of making people feel sorry for ex Tory MP Esther McVeigh. By declaring in his usual manner than McVeigh deserved to be “lynched” – that’s hanged to you and me – and then refusing to apologise is unlikely to play out well with the electorate. It’s terrible politics and reflects very accurately what life is now like in Jeremy Corbyn’s rapidly imploding Labour Party.
McVeigh deserves no sympathy at all from voters and, indeed, her own voters in Liverpool turfed her out at the last election. She was Iain Duncan Smith’s deputy in the DWP in the last government, the woman who closed the Remploy factories, dumping 1500 disabled workers on the dole, and presided over the Bedroom Tax and PIP. In private, she may well be a lovely person who strokes kittens and kisses babies, but in politics she is a nasty piece of work. But she is not as nasty as John McDonnell.
No one should be surprised at McDonnell’s latest behaviour because he is, from all accounts, a seriously unpleasant individual. Read his 2003 comments about the IRA: “It’s about time we started honouring those people involved in the armed struggle. It was the bombs and bullets and sacrifice made by the likes of Bobby Sands that brought Britain to the negotiating table. The peace we have now is due to the action of the IRA,” he spoke of the role for “the ballot, the bullet and the bomb” and made “jokes” about kneecapping. McDonnell regretted “not assassinating Thatcher” (“it was a joke”, he later added) and then referred to his fellow Labour MPs as “fucking useless”. There are volumes more of this stuff. McDonnell, God help us, is the power behind Corbyn’s wobbly throne, the organ grinder to Corbyn’s monkey.
Make no mistake, McVeigh is a nasty piece of work too and was punished by voters at the ballot box. This is how democracy works. Unfortunately, for McDonnell and the nasty version of the Labour Party he now runs, this is what is going to happen to them as well.
The arguments about the direction of the Labour Party are now over. Corbyn’s re-election will now see the party career further to the far left margins of politics because that is the place where the majority of members and supporters now occupy. Labour, having now become a plaything of the affluent middle classes in the major cities, will become a far less attractive option for working class people, many of whom, like me, will have nowhere else to go.
McVeigh is clearly not a nice person given her actions within the last Tory government in which some Liberals had jobs. I am not sure she deserves to be lynched for it, though. Dressing it up as a mere expression of something else, or as McDonnell usually does when he says something unpleasant as a joke won’t wash. If this is what he is like in opposition, imagine what he might be like in government but imagine is all you can do since there is no chance he will ever make it that far.
